UX and the Death of Web Design

I was looking at an info graphic online explaining the rules of UX and one of the rules was to do with picking familiar designs for websites so people were familiar with your site. So top navigation, hero section, and sidebars. Sound familiar? I love bootstrap, the way it’s so easy to implement, it’s like hey presto for websites. Now we have material design, word press themes etc and to be honest they all look the same. When I started learning HTML and CSS back in the dark ages the cool site was zen garden . You could really see the talent some web designers had. Now everything looks very samey plainey. You sort of start to resent the crazy websites that make you work to figure them out. I was in the Alessi website earlier and while it is beautiful, I was like “where do I click?” I was resenting that I had to work to figure it out. That’s kind of sad. It looks like only certain types of websites like high end car manufacturers and designer sites are using artistic freedoms, and more… dare I say “functional” websites are boring but easy to use. Is that good UX? Probably.